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"I don't know what class is but I can tell when one has it, you can tell from a mile away"
-- Coach Bryant

"We always talk about playing 60 minutes but this is a 60-10 game: the 60 minutes of the game and the 10 minutes in the locker room after the game that you remember for the rest of your life."
-- Nick Saban day after beating Clemson

By the way, I misread "civil" as "criminal" in my mind multiple times. This isn't as sick obviously...I think it sends the wrong message though. Someone will make the same mistake I did and think they can run over protesters with impunity now.

We are not endorsing anyone running over a person with a car, whether it is protestors or anyone else. If someone intentionally harms a person, they are going to be charged with a crime, period.

I think a lot of us our seeing what we want in this bill. It looks like the bill is intended to give a measure of protection from punitive lawsuits for people who are put in dangerous situations not of their choosing. The way I see it - the people that would be protected would be a person who thought his life was in danger and hit a protester trying to escape the area (see Reginald Denny), someone that was being blocked from reaching medical help and hit a protester trying to save a life, or a driver who didn't see the protesters and accidentally hit one (e.g. when the BLM protesters started marching on to the interstate in Atlanta during the middle of the night.)

I think the thing is, this law makes a driver immune from "civil" lawsuits. It does not make him immune to criminal lawsuits, but that's already a different beast since in civil court negligence may or may not come into play, but you can be also responsible for what happens by accident even if you weren't technically doing anything wrong; but in criminal court some degree of negligence or intent has to be involved. So this is not about the right to do something intentional, like drive into somebody blocking your path (which is still certainly illegal unless the guy is a straight up threat) nor to drive fast through a street crowded with people (which would still be negligence) but it's only about being blamed for hitting someone by accident (due to ignorance of their being a protest) and being monetarily liable for damages. The whole point of the bill seems to be to attribute the negligence to be on the part of the protester who is intentionally placing himself in place to block a moving vehicle. In essence it is just saying, damages that happen in an accident when there is someone else intentionally trying to block traffic is not your responsibility. To be technical, it has nothing to do with people's rights one way or the other, but about situations in which an accident happens.

By the way, I misread "civil" as "criminal" in my mind multiple times. This isn't as sick obviously...I think it sends the wrong message though. Someone will make the same mistake I did and think they can run over protesters with impunity now.

It doesn't mean a person can't be sued if they hit a protester; it just shifts the line where responsibility meets, so to speak. Now the protester has to show not only that he was struck, but also that the person driving was being negligent in some manner. It does not permit or protect negligence except accidentally if the protester can't show it. I don't have a problem with that, though. The flip side is the driver would have to show this person was in fact a protester and not a normal pedestrian.